


Dance with Her Ghosts

by treefrogie84



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Andy has forgotten more ways to kill someone than you or I will ever know, Gen, Post-Canon, the end is also the beginning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-18
Updated: 2020-07-18
Packaged: 2021-03-05 09:02:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25348153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/treefrogie84/pseuds/treefrogie84
Summary: Shedances, and even her dream self knows it’s beautiful and deadly and terrible.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 59





	Dance with Her Ghosts

She dreams, sometimes (not _those_ dreams, the ones that lead her, all of them, to each other, an unsteady constellation that points forward) of a forgotten voice, telling her that she’s been blessed. Her sword flutters across the chests of half a dozen dummies as unseen hands beat steadily on drums.

She _dances_ , and even her dream self knows it’s beautiful and deadly and terrible.

It’s her beginning, she thinks. Fitting that she should dream of it now, at the end. But she’s not certain, could never be sure. She has, after all, been alive for far too long.

It was a blessing for a long time, centuries, that her beginnings had passed out of mind, out of history. It changed, she thinks, sometime during the Great War. Surrounded by loss, rootless and alone, listening to dying men scream for their mothers— as they always have— and choking on the very air.

Slipping from her bed, Andy picks up one of the short swords lying in the corner, and returns to the beginning. The very start, the first dances she remembers.

Listen to the drums that are only in her head, that beat in time with her heart. A step, reach and retract. Block high and low. Thrust and retreat. 

Other dances from her long history get caught up in it, woven into it when her body jumps from one movement to another. Babylonian combines with things Quynh taught her and then Lykon’s Greek.

Faster and faster, thrust and parry, block and kick. Blindly, her fingers find their homes of the hilt as she launches herself into a spin. Eight men drop in her mind’s eye, dead as her sword carves across their chests. 

She stops, the dance ended, sword extended before the tip drops to the worn floor.

Every dance must end. Hers has been a long one, but it’s done now. All that’s left is the heavy breathing.

**Author's Note:**

> I have never had a media that needed fic as soon as i watched it. And yet, here we are. I don’t know if there will be more or not.


End file.
